Please forgive the traffic noise in the recording - we were out-of-doors and the A23 runs past the end of the garden! No sirens, as far as I'm aware. Also, the tree pollen got to me a bit, so there are a couple of coughs. But it was glorious to be out of doors and able to sing again!
I am often quite glad
that I don’t have a garden! There is a communal garden for our
block of flats, and it’s lovely to be able to go and sit out and
read in the shade on a summer’s day, but I don’t have to do
anything else! Whereas people who have gardens do seem to have to
spend all their time watering, or weeding, or mowing the lawn, or
planting out seeds that they started in the greenhouse…. And seldom
seem to have time to just sit and enjoy it.
But, of
course, in the end all that hard work is worth while. Your
vegetables come up and you have masses of tomatoes, or lettuces, or
beans, or courgettes, or whatever it is you like to grow – often
too much, more than will even fit in your freezer. If you grow
flowers, they produce a beautiful display, and perhaps even smell
nice. I walked past a garden in Brixton the other day where the
owner of the house had obviously chosen roses for their smell, and it
was really lovely!
I
do have an orchid, that was given to me over 14 years ago now by my
daughter and her husband as a “thank you” for their wedding.
Amazingly,
it has lasted and lasted, and even survived and flowered again after
I repotted it earlier this year. Slightly to my surprise, I have to
say!
But you know what? None of us, whether we have big
gardens or just have a few plants on the windowsill, none of us can
actually make our plants grow! We can sow the seeds, we can tend the
plants by watering them regularly and feeding them, and perhaps
pruning as necessary – but we can’t make them grow. They grow
all by themselves, pretty much independent of what we do. I
repotted my orchid very carefully, but it was not down to me whether
I killed it in the process – as it was, thankfully, I didn’t.
But I had no say in the matter.
The person in Jesus’ story today knew that. He planted
some seeds in his garden, and then, as if by magic, the seeds
sprouted and grew, and eventually he was able to harvest a great
crop. He didn’t need to know how it happened; from the story, it
appears that he’d rather forgotten all about it, anyway. And then
suddenly, there is a lovely crop. God had grown the seeds for him,
and enabled them to produce the crop they were designed to
produce.
Well, so far, so good. But
you know what? I’m reminded of another story Jesus told, a story
of someone who sowed his seeds and they went everywhere, and some
fell on the path, and others on rocky or weedy soil, and it seems
that only a minority fell on the fertile soil that enabled it to grow
and reproduce up to a hundred-fold.
We all know that
story, we’ve known it since our earliest days at Sunday School, and
have heard many sermons on it. If you are anything
like me, what you heard – not, I should emphasize, necessarily what
had been said, but what you heard – was that Proper People, or
perhaps I should say Proper Christians, were the ones who were the
fertile soil, where the Word could take root, grow and
flourish.
But, of course, if you were anything like me,
that just made you feel guilty and miserable – what if you weren’t
the good soil? What if you were the stony places, or the weedy
patches? We may
well end up feeling guilty and thinking that we must be
terrible people.
But I don’t think Jesus meant us to
think that! From the story we have just read in Mark’s gospel, it
is God that does the growing and takes care of the result! We don’t.
We don’t really have to worry about whether we are fertile soil or
not; if we are living in God’s country, as God’s people, it’s
God’s job to worry about the fertility or otherwise of the
soil!
Well, so far so good. That’s a fairly
straightforward story of what God’s country is like. But then
Jesus goes on to talk about the mustard seed. Well, you know mustard
seeds. I expect you use them in your cooking, as I sometimes do. You
can buy the seeds, or you can buy the ground seeds as a powder to
make your own mustard – lovely in salad dressings and cheese sauces
– or you can buy ready-made mustard with or without various
flavourings. I’m sure they used mustard as a seasoning back in
Bible times, too – but it was, and is, a terrific weed. They
tended to use the wild plant, because if you cultivated it – well,
it was like kudzu or rhododendrons, or even mint – you’d never
get rid of it! Nobody would actually go and plant it, any more than
you or I would plant stinging-nettles in the fields. And, Mark tells
us, it grows into a shrub which can accommodate birds in its
branches.
The thing is, that we don’t really realise, is
that Jesus was taking the passage that we heard in our first reading,
from Ezekiel, and twisting it. Ezekiel tells
us that God will take a shoot from the cedar tree and grow it into
the biggest tree there ever was, so that birds could shelter in it,
and everybody would know that God was the Lord.
And Jesus
takes this and twists it. The other gospel-writers who retell this
story say that the mustard-seed grows into a tree – but, of course,
it doesn’t; it is at best a waist-high shrub. If you travel
through a mustard-growing area, you will see what the plants are
like, with pale yellow flowers. Not as harsh as rapeseed oil
flowers, much paler yellow, rather pretty. It grows – or modern
cultivars do – about waist height for easy harvesting. But in
Israel it was a weed and grew anywhere and everywhere. Even here you
often get wild mustard, known as charlock, growing among other crops,
or on field edges.
No, a mustard plant was not
comparable to a huge cedar tree. Yet Jesus says this is what the
Kingdom of Heaven, God’s Country, is like. And elsewhere he says
that
it’s like yeast that makes dough bubble up and become bread. We
might think this is a Good Thing, but for Jews, the most proper bread
of all was the matzo, or unleavened bread, that they ate each year at
Passover. I still remember being told, when I was in about Year 2 at
school, that this was actually a good idea because a sourdough
starter could get old and too sour over the course of a year, so it
was better to start again at least once a year.
However
that may be, most of the stories Jesus tells about God’s Country
are like that. It’s not at all a comfortable place – and yet
people are willing to sell all they have to get tickets there!
In
a way, Jesus’ stories today show the two sides of the Kingdom. The
first is that we can’t do anything to hurry things up. Seeds grow
in their own good time. We may long and long to see revival,
although whether we’d actually like it if we saw it is another
matter, but we can do nothing to hurry it up. God has it all in
hand, and you can be quite sure that if and when there is something
for us to do to bring about God’s Kingdom, we’ll know!
Then
we find it’s not what we expected. It’s not tall, beautiful
trees with wood-pigeons cooing and blackbirds shouting; instead, it’s
a shrubby weed, with much smaller birds – sparrows, perhaps, or
even starlings – jostling for space and chuntering about it.
But
then, if you think about it, weeds are very persistent. Trees take
years to grow. Five or six years ago there was an initiative in
Brockwell Park to plant some trees, and we took our elder grandson,
then aged about five, to help plant some. Many
of the trees planted that day have survived, although not all, but
they are really not much bigger than they were, and are certainly not
the big, shady trees they might be when my grandson takes his
grandsons to look at the trees he helped plant.
But weeds,
now. Weeds grow quickly, and they are persistent creatures. They
rapidly take over any fallow land, and can push up even through
concrete. The Kingdom of God is like a weed that can grow anywhere,
in surprising places.
We didn’t read the Epistle today
because we aren’t supposed to go on too long, but it was that
passage where St Paul reminds us that if anyone is in Christ, there
is a new creation. Old things are done away, and all has become new.
Whether this newness has come through the unseen working of the
Spirit in our hearts, or through the way God’s kingdom is simply
not what we had been led to expect, it
is nevertheless a new creation.
God, we are often told,
comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. We have all
been shaken up by this pandemic – how can we be God’s people in
the world when we aren’t allowed to go into the world? How can we
worship God when we can’t meet together, or sing when we do meet?
We have found answers to those questions, not always satisfactorily,
but we have. God has been working, and it has showed.
So
what I am going to leave with you today is this: are you allowing God
to work in you, like the man in his garden, or are you going to have
to wait until the weeds push up through the paving stones and
concrete around your heart? Amen.
